I have been thinking lately that I am suffering from an affliction I suspect many others at my workplace are also attempting to cope with: for want of a better term, “analysis paralysis.”
Ever since I began my present work assignment, I have been confronted with one ambitious “to-do list” after another. We have produced many, many lists and attempted to prioritize the items at many, many meetings I have attended. Among the giant list of tasks is the recently-revised and distributed, overwhelming, intimidating, multi-page strategic-plan document.
I have to admit: in the face of so much to do, and so little guidance about what the priorities are, I tend to remain somewhat frozen. Because, everything is a priority, I’m told. And, what I know is that when everything is a priority, nothing is. And that when everybody is responsible, nobody can be.
The organization is attempting to change several dimensions of its collective being all at the same time. Stress is high. Communication is low. Ad hoc decisions abound. Everyone is off balance; or, at least I know I am.
Come to think of it, all of this is sounding amazingly familiar. Because…
My 1995 dissertation about alcohol use and socialization in a college fraternity, used the “addictive organization” paradigm of Anne Wilson Schaef (1988) as the guiding theoretical framework. This way of looking at workgroups (and, in my study, a social group) came about as a rather logical extension of the “dysfunctional family” literature, which sees family groups behaving as addicts. Schaef proposed that it is possible to “recognize that organizations themselves are addicts, and that they function corporately the same way any individual addict functions” (p. 137).
Some of the elements of an addictive organization, according to Schaef (see chapter 4, pp. 137-176), include:
Whew! Now that’s a long list of symptoms! (Yet another list, sorry!) Yet, for the purposes of summarizing the model here, I’ve tried to be quite concise.
My question: I just wonder if there is anybody else who might be seeing and experiencing any of my current reality?